This morning as I was riding my bicycle to work, just as I turned from a side street onto San Pedro I encountered an Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority late model Chevy Pickup driving northbound in the southbound bicycle lane. City of Albuquerque guidelines for the width of a bicycle trail on a street such as San Pedro (according to the Albuquerque Bikeways and Trails Master Plan Design Guidelines) is 5 feet or 60 inches. According to Edmunds.com the width of a 2011 Chevrolet Silverado regular cab work truck is 79.9 inches or nearly 20 inches wider than the likely width of the bicycle lane. Even if the lane is the widest recommended length (for a bicycle trail parallel to a street with traffic traveling greater than 40 MPH) of 6 feet the truck is wider by almost 8 inches. This means that the northbound utility truck in the southbound bicycle lane that I encountered this morning not only took up the entirety of that bicycle lane, it also obtruded an appreciable distance into the actual automobile travel lane.
The driver of the truck had what looked like a dustpan affixed to a handle sticking out of the window with the dustpan looking device placed just above the sidewalk. With the device sticking out of the window taking some attention it wasn’t apparent that the driver even saw a bicyclist in front of him. As the truck approached at uneven speed I noticed in my rear view mirror southbound traffic approaching at an almost perfect trajectory to pass the truck at the same time as I would imparting visions of doom comprised of me as the meat in an automobile bread sandwich. A few hundred feet in front of the approaching truck I went right on to the sidewalk, careful not to rack myself as my rigid steel fork traversed the steep incline at the end of a driveway, at what I thought would be a safe distance and moved as far right as I could as to avoid the dustpan device and passed the truck as the driver momentarily acknowledged my existence with a surprised expression, confirming my suspicions in regard to his attention level.
What in the world was that driver doing? I have made apathetic attempts today to learn if the driver’s actions were legal and cannot find anything even pretending that it’s ok for a Water Utility Truck to travel in the opposite lane so long as they are in the bike lane in traffic. I called the utility to complain and unfortunately was not able to collect my thoughts quickly enough to record any identifying numbers from the truck, only the time and the location so that led nowhere and was not given an explanation or recognition of wrongdoing.
In my own, decidedly-not-infinite-wisdom, I have a theory as to what happened. I think that the utility employee was collecting some kind of information with the dust pan device and that the probable policy involves getting out of the truck and walking the sidewalk but this employee was so lazy that instead of walking a short distance decided to drive it, no matter the hazards, in order to save time. Time that would be wasted later anyway as it isn’t hard to believe that this employee would take those savings, compared to what was allotted for the task, and use them to nap. Likely, most employees of the utility are hard working and do not take dangerous shortcuts but those employees are transparent to most people, which is by design. The employee that I had an unfortunate encounter with this morning ruins the reputation of the utility by taking special, and very dangerous, traffic privileges in a very nontransparent way. My only regret is that I did not record any identifying information nor use my cell phone video recorder to capture the moment. If there is a next time I will be better prepared.
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